Thursday, July 24, 2008

This Friday evening Montgomery County and the DTSS management will mark the formal end of the beloved "Turf" by hosting a going away party. The whole thing is kind of ironic in that an entity is throwing a funeral for something that they themselves are killing. The fact that they deem the Turf worthy of such an event acknowledges that it is something people really liked and will miss when it's gone. (Remember back when the "Turf Wars" were in full swing? Seems like so long ago. I guess the opposition just gave up.)

Anyway, I have been racking my brain trying to figure out why the event has been named "Sign of the Times". Did I miss something?

The poster doesn't even make any damn sense...

First of all, it's not "The Green", it's "The Turf". I don't think I've ever heard it referred to it as "The Green" in the proper-noun sense. (In retrospect, it should have been christened "Soylent Green", but I guess we missed the boat on that one.) And do you really have a farewell party TO something rather than FOR something?? Did they get this poster made in a Shanghai street market? Next thing you know, we'll have a Translate Server Error restaurant opening up on The Promenade. And what's with the skyline? We don't have skyscrapers. Yet.

Aside from having faceless alien DJs hurl rainbows at us, what else could they do to give the Turf a proper sendoff? Personally, I think they should soak the entire carpet in gasoline and light the sucker on fire. Hell, you may not even need the gas - there's so much crap soaked in that carpet it'd probably go up like a Roman candle.

Well, I'll be there out of curiosity and to get my chunk of filthy carpet.

UPDATE: Perhaps the enigmatic title of the event refers to the fact that they plan to reveal the construction sign for the new civic center. I suppose we are expected to let out collective ooooooohhhs and ahhhhhhhs when they do.

11 comments:

Back in the day when I lived in New York, a classmate came into school with a ziplock bag full of dirt and turf.

It seemed like a stupid thing to be carrying around, but then he explained its provenance. The dirt and grass had been ripped from the field at Shea Stadium the night before, when the New York Mets rose from the dead to beat the Boston Red Sox in Game 5 of the World Series. (The Mets eventually won the whole shebang.)

And with that, my classmate became the coolest kid on the planet.

Now my opportunity has come to attain that level of coolness, to clutch a piece of (artificially) green history. *sniffle-sniffle*

So I walked by the sign on Saturday. In true MoCo fashion, the names of Ike and the gang of 9 take up the vast majority of the real estate on the sign, far more than anything about the actual "Civic Center."